Laura Kasischke's Space, in Chains (Copper Canyon, 2011)

Winner of the National Book Critics' Circle Award for Poetry, Space, in Chains combines the banal and the metaphysical with surprising effectiveness. I'm especially intrigued by Kasischke's ideas about mortality and death. 



How easy it would have been instead
to stand up shouting
about cold, dumb death.

from "View from Glass Door"

July, that lovely hell, all

velvet dresses and drapes

stuffed into a hot little hole.

opening stanza of "July"

I stumbled into this place with my suitcase packed full of prior obligations. The floor of the orchard littered with soft fruit, and the wasps hovering drunkenly over it all, and the last few pieces dangling from the branches--happiness, melancholy, sexual desire--poised in the vibrating air, ready to fall.

*

In our fading animal memories:

The humming gold of being, and ceasing to be. The exposed motor of eternity.

the beginning and end of "Wasps"

And all the embezzled

cents and dollars

of the last time I saw you.

last stanza of "Rain"

The trees

in their temporary trances, and we in our animate brevity.

from "Medical Dreams"

The last hour waiting patiently on a tray for her somewhere in the future. The spoon slipping quietly into the beautiful soup.

end of "Near Misses"

There is a bridge from here to there. But we all know it is the kind of bridge that blows away. The kind of bridge made mostly of magazines, cheap beer, TV.

from "Riddle"

The way music, our savior, is the marriage of math and antisocial behavior.

from "O Elegant Giant"

And then 

through my weird tears

a clear vision

at the center of the others:

My father 

and the way for decades he drank his beer

beneath our bare bulb in the basement, like

a man desperately struggling to drown

a pale deer slowly in a shallow pond.

end of "Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, Mist"

Most days I cling to a single word. It is a mild-mannered creature made of thought. Future, or Past. Never the other, obvious word. Whenever I reach out to touch that one, it scurries away.

opening stanza of "Riddle"

In the UK you can buy Space, in Chains from Foyle's; in the US, try your local independent. 

Rae Armantrout's Versed, first selection

While Rae Armantrout's reputation in the States is firmly established, she is not well known in the UK, so I'm going to post selections of her latest book, Versed (Wesleyan University Press, 2010), partly in the hope of attracting more readers on this side of the pond. Versed won both the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry last year.

The book is divided in two sections, Versed and Dark Matter. These selections all come from the first section. This is only a small selection of the excellent passages and poems--I had such a difficult time paring back what to share!

Metaphor forms

a crust

beneath which

the crevasse

of each experience.

from "Versed"

Day hoists its mesh

of near

approximations

(its bright

skein of pores).

from "Fetch"

Carried by light,

images remain

while sensation

is so evanescent

as to be always beyond

belief.

from "Outer"

Time flows

because no set

of proofs

can be complete.

from "Relations"

Songs as empathy

evacuation engines.

*

Any statement I issue,

if particular enough,

will prove

I was here

from "Locality"

Moment to

moment's stretched

plausibility.

from "Stretch"

Pathos

of strangers' headlights

tracing the curve at dusk

is inexplicable

the end of "Bonding"

Symbolism as the party face of paranoia.

Chorus of expert voices beyond my door, forever

dissecting my case.

"But the part is sick

of representing the whole."

from "Own"

Rae Armantrout's Versed can be purchased from The Book Depository for a mere £7.24, with free shipping.